Sunday, October 27, 2013

Competence

Remember when people imagined that a community organizer's major strength as president would be competence?

This could be written without laughter leaking into the keyboard. But people actually believed it (and lots still do, amazingly):

The team the U.S. president-elect is assembling around him is strikingly centrist in nature, a group of people known more for its competence than for its ideology.

Please explain how these uber-competent people could design Obamacare to rely on healthy young people signing up for mandatory insurance in order to pay for the whole project designed to expand coverage to sicker people. And yet allow these young people to stay on their parents' insurance until they are 26 and--because the group designated to pay for the system probably doesn't know where to buy a stamp and so must enroll online--roll out a web site so poorly designed that nobody without memories of dial-up Internet usage would put up with the "glitches" (which is apparently the administration-approved term for systemic incompetence in design)?

Yeah, they kept using that word "competence." I don't think that word means what they thought it meant.